The Balaka Second Grade Magistrate Court has convicted and sentenced Geoffrey Chinyama and Laiton Juma to nine years imprisonment with hard labour (IHL) for being found guilty of theft of a cancer-detecting gadget, contrary to section 282 of the Penal Code.<\/p>\n
State Prosecutor, Sub Inspector Ellias Chitsulo, told the court that Balaka Police received information that Dr Briony Acroyd\u2019s portable ultra-sound machine, which is used to diagnose breast cancer, was stolen from a car on February 5 2018 when the medical expert was travelling to Mangochi to attend to patients showing signs of cancer.<\/p>\n
Chitsulo said, on February 11, a team of detectives from Ulongwe Police received a tip that someone was keeping a laptop and, in the course of following up, the officers arrested Chinyama and Juma and managed to recover the ultra sound machine on the same day.<\/p>\n
Chinyama and Juma were convicted on their own plea of guilty.<\/p>\n
Chitsulo asked the court to mete out a stiff sentence considering circumstances in which the crime was committed.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey came as well-wishers and were paid $100 for helping the doctor out of the mud but they were so ungrateful that their act painted a very bad picture of Malawians. The offence is very serious and the machine stolen might have been used to save someone\u2019s life,\u201d Chitsulo said.<\/p>\n
In mitigation, the two said they are breadwinners; hence, they asked the court to be soft on them.<\/p>\n
But Second Grade Magistrate Victor Sibu concurred with the State, and sentenced the convicts to nine years IHL to deter would-be-offenders.<\/p>\n
Chinyama, 31, and Juma, 22, are from Nsaliwa Village, Traditional Authority Kalembo in Balaka District.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Balaka Second Grade Magistrate Court has convicted and sentenced Geoffrey Chinyama and Laiton Juma to nine years imprisonment with hard labour (IHL) for being found guilty of theft of a cancer-detecting gadget, contrary to section 282 of the Penal Code. State Prosecutor, Sub Inspector Ellias Chitsulo, told the court that Balaka Police received information […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":60588,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-60686","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60686","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60686"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60686\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":60688,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60686\/revisions\/60688"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/60588"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60686"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60686"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60686"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}